From Charles Burchfield to Peter Adams in 2008. Additional gifts to the Southern Alleghenies Museum's pastel collection are planned. One of Karl's largest works "Windswept Sierras", has been promised to the California Art Club for its permanent collection. Assessment and oeuvre Arny Karl's professional career was relatively short, no more than twenty years. In that time Jeffrey Morseburg, his dealer and fellow student of Theodore Lukits, estimates that he painted about 400-500 plein-air Pastels and about 100-150 oil paintings, so his artistic oeuvre was very limited. He was famously eccentric and difficult, so relationships with dealers were seldom steady. According to Morseburg's essays, Karl's earliest pastel works from the late 1960s and early 1970s were "blocky" with bold strokes of color. As his pastel works matured, the strokes of pastels became almost imperceptible, as he began to "paint" with his fingers. Karl's pastel works of the mid-1990s consisted primarily of foothill scenes, often of California Oaks or Eucalyptus. Some of his later pastel works could be quite detailed, in spite of the artist's eye problems. Sierra Autumn, Big Sur Overlook and Mono Lake, all of which were shown in public exhibitions, are all examples of these detailed pastels. Karl's early works in oil were thinly painted, with little impasto and boldly colored, evidently too boldly for many collector's tastes. His later oils could be more thinly painted or thickly brushed examples of California Impressionism. Most of these works relied on imprecise brushwork and were painted in a cool palette. Scenes of the Central California Coast and the High Sierras predominated in the works of Karl's last decade. Art authorities such as Michael Tomor, former Chief Curator of the Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art or art curator Jeffrey Morseburg, describe Karl as a "romantic" or "lyrical" painter because of his "moody" subjects and curvilinear compositions. In his 1999 exhibition catalog Tomor stated that "Jeffrey Morseburg, Lukits' biographer, believes Karl to be inspired by Lukits' pastels as well as the works of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) and J. M. W. Turner (1775-1841). His Blue Moment and Pink Moments, plein-air pastels of the Sierra Mountains, convey the sublime and awe inspiring aspects of nature." While Karl's artistic oeuvre was small, because of his influence on a number of younger painters, strident advocacy of plein-air painting and the pastel medium and presence in several important public and private collections his influence is still being